RPA services market to balloon up 47% by 2024, says Zinnov

Zinnov, a global management and strategy consulting firm, has released a report on the annual global ratings of robotic process automation (RPA) services companies.

The study, titled 'Zinnov Zones for RPA Services - 2019,' is aimed at helping enterprise customers understand the evolving market landscape of outsourced RPA services and enable them to make informed decisions on selecting the right service partners.

Under RPA services, Zinnov considers RPA advisory, bot development and configuration, deployment, management, support, and training as the major scope of work.

The study evaluated 22 major RPA services companies for their scale and capabilities in these areas.

The report highlights that in FY2019, enterprises spent just over US$2.3B on RPA globally, of which US$570M - $600M was spent on outsourcing to RPA service providers.

Zinnov expects the outsourced RPA services market to grow at a massive 47% annually to reach a staggering US$4B in the next five years.

The increasing focus on intelligent automation, deepening technology partnerships, investments in IP creation and Center of Excellence (COE) set up around RPA is enabling outsourced service providers to rapidly scale their market presence.

As a result, the total installed RPA talent pool with Service Providers is already in excess of 52,000, with India commanding a ~55% share of the same globally.

The study found that the top four industries, including banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI); healthcare; retail and consumer goods; and telecom and media accounted for approximately 80% of the total spend on RPA services in FY2019.

There was also negligible RPA adoption within the engineering research and development outsourcing services in FY2019.

The study also identified that ~40% of RPA deals in the last 12 months were aligned to 'intelligent automation,' with a focus on leveraging AI/ML techniques to handle unstructured data and complete tasks with human-like decision-making.

One-third of all enterprise RPA engagements with service providers had an annual contract value of less than US$50,000, with one-in-five customers scaling their RPA outsourcing engagements over US$1M annually.

25% of all deals in FY2019 also had some form of outcome-based pricing woven into the service contract.

"As it stands today, RPA is already a $50B+ addressable opportunity that is increasingly becoming hard for Service Providers to ignore,” Zinnov digital transformation partner and global head Praveen Bhadada says.

“The exponential growth in this segment is forcing the services companies to participate in this opportunity more seriously by focusing on micro-vertical use cases, exploring M&A opportunities, and co-investing with customers on setting up dedicated Intelligent Automation COEs. Services companies have already deployed 60,000+ bots for their customers, and this is expected to grow rapidly as providers scale their RPA practices."